


if the sun won't rise

by dellaluce



Series: the bleeding fader [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-12
Updated: 2011-06-12
Packaged: 2017-10-20 08:56:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,070
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/210995
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dellaluce/pseuds/dellaluce
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>she was never meant to keep him.</i> [scratch-fic; final fantasy x crossover]</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. out in the garden where we planted the seeds

**Author's Note:**

> first chapter inspired by [this picture](http://bassara.deviantart.com/art/First-and-Last-Dance-207629741) by sionnac.

**> dave: lie to her.**  
([the cinematic orchestra - to build a home](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QB0ordd2nOI))

He stands in her greenhouse, counting clouded breaths.

She insists on wearing the dress, the fancy one that pulses with starlight and supernovas, makes her look like she's draped the whole of creation around her. _Never worn anything so nice_ , she'd said with that little smile of hers that he hates right now, crimped lips as she sucks in badness like a black hole. _I want to, at least once._

It goes unsaid, the rest of it. He can't bring himself to say it, mouth dry and clumsy, and she never would for all he wants to take her by the shoulders and shake her. The way she dances pitfalls in her language is almost elegant. It's mostly infuriating.

He wears his black suit. They look like they're going to a funeral.

She gathers up dead flowers in her arms, cradles them; frosted tulips, amaranth curling up against its name, lolling tendrils of love-lies-bleeding. Her rounds take five minutes in silence and so many breaths and she comes back around to him, shoulders shaking, arms full of deep red flowers. “I grew these for you,” she says, and doesn't cry--not like he had when he'd realized, bridge of his nose pinched and tongue clamped until it gave beneath his front teeth. Her world isn't ending, not like his. It never started.

His hand finds the curve of her cheek and he leans down to press a kiss into her hair. It doesn't seem to matter much now, the peacock posturing and the rampart raised between skin and skin; she nuzzles against his palm and he lets her, pulls her in, crushes the flowers between them, rests his head on hers. “You ready?” His voice feels like steel wool and cracking leather.

“Not really.” A hiccup of a laugh. “Not just yet.”

“No rush.” He pulls his head back, watches everything in her rally for something so simple as smile. His thumb presses at the corner of her mouth, coaxes one out of her, but there's resignation in it that hurts his chest like bruising and he wishes she wouldn't smile at all. “We got time.”

They don't. They won't. They never did. They take some anyway, his arm snaking around her waist, hand splayed on the small of her back. The fabric of her dress feels cold like space does.

She sways to music that isn't playing. He follows.

“It's going to be fine,” she insists without insistence, convinces without conviction. It reminds him of lit class, reading passages aloud, where no one ever meant it or felt a damn thing. “We're going to be fine. We'll all be together again and we'll win next time.”

“New game plus.” His smile is wry, humorless. “Keep all our best shit, curbstomp all the bosses, and speed run right on through. Second playthrough is always a joke.”

“Only if you remember what happened the first time around.”

He's not John; he's no noble optimist, no believer, no moral obligations beyond a few grey rules scribbled in his margins. He'd like to say he hates lying to her, but he doesn't, doesn't even regret it when the bitter taste of it washes his mouth like communion wine. He'll say anything if it makes him strong.

“I'm gonna remember you, Jade. Count on it.”

He could pave a road to nowhere with all his broken promises, but he's not sure how much it matters when they're already there.


	2. the same mistake a million times

**> jade: dance.**  
( final fantasy x | [sarah fimm - december](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpTizFzKkPU) )

She meets him for the first time off the coast of Djose, knee-deep in the bodies of his friends.

He's all soot and machina grease and violent movements, flipping over the dead and reducing them to glimmer, hands full of dog tags and markers to take back to families. His jaw is set against the smell and the sadness; he's a survivor from the Al Bhed specialists, she thinks, because he's blond and desert-lean and acts like this isn't the first time he's had to count corpses from scripture-wars.

She watches him pick the battlefield apart, crowlike. He watches her dance.

She slips her shoes off and walks into the tide, onto the tide, weightless and holy. Her feet are warm with soldier blood, thick and sticky between her toes, and she dances on bodies because the water bloats with them; she has nowhere else to dance. The sky explodes into fragments of human spirits, pyreflies the color of shimmering oil-water. She dances until sweat beads down her back and her staff handle slicks in her damp hands. ( _Her teachers would be proud of this Sending, her perfect graceful movements, but it only hurts her in ways that are more than side-stitches. Her art is built on bones._ )

Only two words are given, only by her: “I'm sorry.”

She's used to grief and the grieving because it's half of her job; she's used to gratitude and reverence in turns, lines of the mourning wanting to kiss her hands and thank her, thank her, thank her. He's different. He shifts tinted machinist goggles into his hair. Says nothing. Fixes her with swirling maelstrom Al Bhed eyes, murder-red and so hateful it turns her stomach. There's a feeling curving up her spine that she can't put a word to.

Leaving is her only option, so she does.

\---

She meets him for the second time in the dead hours, all that shouting outside Djose's temple that rouses her from sleep. The priests tell her, warn her, grab at her arms and plead with her not to go out, that there's a heretic raging for Yevonite blood. She doesn't listen.

He's thrashing out of a headlock when she storms out into the night in only her dressing gown, his lips cut and swollen and flecking blood as he yells curses in that harsh, throaty desert language. Four guards are on the ground and it takes three more to restrain him as they dodge his flailing punches, the spit he hocks at their faces when they finally get his arms. He's all bruises and fury and she's never seen anyone so painfully _raw._

( _Other people would leave now, turn their heads and never speak about it in polite company; there is an order to these things. She thinks of the cold grey coast and warm soldier blood, though, and she will not add to that. She can stop this. It's why she's here._ )

“He's my guardian,” she lies. Everyone knows it's a lie--she has none, she came alone, she mourns the only one she had and lost with beads on woven white fur. No one is willing to say it. She is sacred.

He's gone by the next morning without saying goodbye, or giving a name, or thanking her. Two days after, she descends into the cloister to pray for the world and for him and for the Djose fayth, that impossible thing of soft wool and static and saturnine poise. Ixion reminds her of him, in the end; smoke and soot, arcing and unpredictable and sudden, fiery transcending fire in the sear of white-hot whipcracks. It rests somewhere in her chest, electricity that sticks to her heartbeat.

Mostly, it feels like home.

\---

She meets him for the third time at the Moonflow, swinging fists into a man's face.

She fights her way through a crowd that is _boiling_ , gathered in crushing arena rings that are too angry to hold their form. She's not sure who threw the first rock, but now they're pelting him, and still he sits on a man's chest, fists cracking against bone over and over and over; and then she is _screaming_ , screaming for him to stop, for the crowd to stop, but they're still reaching for him, collapsing in onto him, and he's still swinging in that gruesome rhythmic way, because she's just one girl and this is a place where status and ceremony don't mean _anything_ and she's only a face and lost words in the churn.

She reaches out for her Aeons in desperation and it's Ixion who answers, static in her teeth and her ribs. The people who are grabbing for her, to pull her aside to get to him, are too close when the first shockwaves happen; they get whipped to the side like flirtations of matter, and the ones close enough to them look on wide-eyed, and then the crowd cleaves itself apart, a hundred people scrambling for distance. ( _There's so much to being a summoner that's just quiet, passive power, a station built on social graces, it-is-because-it-is, but this is different, this is Real and Now and it's hers and everyone knows it. Ixion is her frightening electric markhor, plasma and bone links and sickle-horn, stomping sand into glass with its hooves. She swells with the power of it._ )

He's looking at her now, that same look from Djose, the one from before words happened, just aching and confused and so, so tired. When she offers him her hand ( _a way out_ ), he closes his eyes, shakes his head in that slow, defeated sway, and takes it.

When they walk away together--him listing with blood loss, her wedged under his arm to keep him standing--no one in the crowd dares to stop them.

\---

The first thing he says to her on the road to Guadosalam: “You're fucking abysmal at this.”

She takes forceps and catgut to a gash in his arm that won't stop bleeding. It's not the first time she's done this, but he keeps twitching, and she can't see as well as she wishes she could in the crackling firelight. Four times already she's had to pull a stitch out and string it back up; he sucks air in through his teeth, holds his breath, mutters desert-tongue at her on the release. She's running out of baijiu to pour on it.

“Maaaaybe,” she drawls, “someone shouldn't have started a riot?” She tugs. He hisses.

“You didn't hear? It was cultural exchange.” He reaches out with the arm that hasn't been locked in place for half an hour and takes a nip of the dwindling liquor. “Keep forgetting people pull knives to say 'hey' in Yevon territory. And I guess, you know, 'heretic' and some shit about his son. Guess it was my bad, I forgot Al Bhed are supposed to just bend over in this neck of the _would you fucking quit that_?”

“I would if you'd hold _still_!”

“I thought all you people knew white magic. Where's my Cure spell?”

“With another summoner,” she grinds out through a jaw locked in concentration. She gives one last pull on the thread, ties it off in a square knot, and snips it free. There's a bowl of bandages soaking in baijiu at her feet and she begins to wrap his arm with a long, seaweed tangle of them. “We aren't all healers, you know.”

( _She finds it a funny thing to say in the middle of playing doctor, but this is how it's always been; the other acolytes and summoner-aspirants--they were the same back then, the acolytes were children and all children dreamed of being summoners when they grew up, before they learned what it meant to be one--would sit on the temple floor with their hands on their knees and listen to the priests give lessons in scripture and magic. Then they'd practice in the library, or in the courtyard, kiss each other's cuts and scrapes clean with sparks of life and holy._

 _But that wasn't for her. She'd stand outside in the winter gloaming with her practice staff and dance out the steps to stranger magics, draining and poison and gravity; she'd write trails in diamond dust and embers and corona discharge. She learned about death, so that when she'd finally meet Sin and its monster-children, she'd be prepared._

 _Twenty-nine priestlings started their own pilgrimages the same year she left Bevelle, armed with their shields and their cures and their clinical warrior-monk guardians. She's the only one left in the field._ )

“We don't all have knives, either,” she adds, reaching over to take the bottle from him. It tastes like a petrify spell, all fire and paint thinner settling uncomfortably in her stomach. It makes all her knotted muscles ache.

He laughs then, or at least the closest she's heard from him so far; it's a soft chuckle originating from somewhere deep in his diaphragm. “Yeah,” he says, taking the bottle she offers. “You don't seem the stab-happy type.”

She smiles, and he sort-of smiles, and they pass the baijiu back and forth until the night grows late and the bottle's empty.

\---

The home of the Guado has no temple, no Fayth to pray to; it's a pilgrim's layover, and summoners are rare. They spend a night as a courtesy to the Guado Maester, who greets her personally with a strange smile and a stranger entourage of ladies-in-waiting to carry the slithering, silken train of her robes.

“We can have the Al Bhed removed immediately, Lady Summoner, if that is your wish,” the Maester says, watery-voiced and watery-gestured, waving a billowing, long-fingered hand. “Your presence is an honor which need not be tarnished by tolerance of the heathen-race.”

She doesn't know if the arm she extends into his path is to protect the Guado from him or him from the Guado, but the way she says what follows, the strength in her conviction, almost makes her believe that she's telling the truth: “He's my _guardian_.”

There's nothing in scripture that forbids it; there's nothing the Maester can do but swallow that vaguely reptilian tongue of hers and smile thinly, mirrored on the faces of her assistants. “Of course. I did not mean to disrespect the Lady Summoner's choices.”

They shuffle in the way of the newly-converted, trying too hard to please.

He laughs at them in that sharp, bitter way of his all the way down the hall.

Later that night, after the pleasantries have been safely tucked away--and the Maester too busy to take supper with them, so sorry, so sorry--they sit together in their room, cross-legged at a table bearing as close as she's come to a feast since the Fire Festival in Kilika, held in her honor. She watches him pluck at fruits she's sure he's never seen, native as they are to the northern reaches of the mainland, plums and sour cherries and pears from the hills of Bevelle; he eats with his hands and drinks his tea from the bowl all wrong and makes her laugh with jokes she would never hear otherwise.

“For the record? You don't have to cover for me,” he says eventually, pushing aside an empty plate. “Handled myself just fine before you came sashaying in. 'Ooh Lady Summoner, ooh.' How do you even put up with that shit?”

She snorts into her tea bowl and covers her mouth with a hand, grinning so wide it hurts. “It's not something that I 'put up with,' it's just part of the job! And besides, I've seen you handle yourself. Is that Al Bhed for 'yell a lot and complain about stitches'?”

“That's the exact translation. Didn't know you spoke.” And then his face draws into a tight and serious look, a shift as easy as his small, secret grins. The lines on his face are accustomed to the movements. “Look. I appreciate you sticking your neck out for me and everything, but I don't do charity or hand-outs or any twisted kind of Yevon PR games. I'll play along as far as the Plains, but then I'm catching a ride back with some of the Al Bhed there. They already know you're full of shit, but it's not your ass on the line.”

She looks at him then, this man who could dust his hair, hide his eyes, wear local styles and go incognito for years with ease; she's known his people to do this, sometimes, when the desert couldn't sustain them all. He could pass as a blitzer from Besaid, a fisherman from Djose, fake an hour's prayer at temple and carve out a life for himself--if it mattered to him.

It doesn't. He'd rather suck the blood off his knuckles and find somewhere else to be.

( _She looks at him and feels pinpricks of admiration and jealousy--this man who'd rather fight than be molded._

 _What could she have been if she had done the same?_ )

“It doesn't have to be a lie,” she offers after a moment's quiet, voicing a consideration she's had since she woke with her first hangover from the baijiu and he laughed at at her, teasing. “I don't have a guardian anymore.”

“Moving a little fast, lady. You haven't even bought me dinner yet.” He looks at her, and to where her fingers play with the string of beads woven into her hair, and his eyebrow quirks. “Are you serious? Actually, better question: Are you retarded? You'll get the tan laughed off your ass.”

She smiles, something a little cold and hard and diamond-like, and reaches out for him, palm up and fingers splayed. “They won't be laughing when an Al Bhed helps defeat Sin.”

His mouth hangs open briefly, poised to fire and shoot her down, but realization dawns in a tightness in his face. His jaw clicks shut and he considers her in silence.

Then: “You're fucking crazy.”

He must be too, she thinks, because he takes her hand.

\---

She had started her pilgrimage knowing that her first guardian was not going to see the end of it.

He had been ancient, her great white spiritwalker of a Ronso who spoke volumes in few words; she had only ever known him with weariness in layers beneath that strength and grace. Most days, she figured it was his promise to the parents she'd never known that kept his heart beating, too loyal and honor-bound to leave, but he was old and the journey would be cruel. In the weeks before they left Bevelle together, she practiced the dance she would use to send him.

She wished he could've made it to Gagazet, see his home again, but he left her in Besaid, in the wreckage of their boat. When she could breathe again without the rattle of water in her lungs, she danced the dance she made for him and watched his pyreflies drift off like tufts of dandelion. The priests told her to stay put, that a summoner should never go without protection, that someone could be trained and assigned to her and she could resume the pilgrimage in a few months--but she'd left on a boat to Kilika the next morning instead.

There is no replacing the irreplaceable. That's why her new guardian--her caprine, electric Al Bhed, this man who digs in his heels and won't back down--is an addition, fighting alongside a ghost.

( _She has prepared herself for a successful pilgrimage since she was a small girl, face nuzzled into white fur while she listened to a deep, rumbling earthquake of a voice tell her about what it means to be a summoner. She has always meant to do it alone: because when there are two, none come back. High Summoners have parades in their honor, and titles bestowed upon them, and their statues raised in every temple across the continent. No one remembers the guardians but the last and the first._

 _All he'll be getting is the dance she makes for him._

 _If it happens at all, she thinks, it will have to be beautiful._ )

They work well together, carving a path through the Thunder Plains, rainsoaked and miserable. He cuts an elegant silhouette against the lightning; he is all lithe muscle and sinew, liquid metal in his coils as he makes his own sort of dance with the momentum of neat, precise swordwork. Glowering lightning-fiends who smell like smoke and gunpowder stop them only briefly before blade and ice tear them into clusters of pyreflies.

Sometimes those clusters hang and hover and she'll pull her wet hair out of her face and dance for them, just a little, just enough to break them up and send them on their way.

“Do we really have time for all this dancing?” He takes a rag to his sword, wipes off black fiend-blood where the rain can't wash it fast enough. “I mean, as much as I love sleeping in water up to my ass and praying I don't get chicken-fried by all this fucking lightning, I'd like to be dry at some point this week.”

“It's just practice,” she says, and never any more than that.

\---

Macalania Temple is where the numbers start to matter.

Five: Valefor in Besaid, prayed to in heartsickness with bruised ribs, knees indented and red from kneeling on the stone floor. The Fayth with a voice like suzu gongs filled her lungs in great, valiant gusts; the Aeon, an avian who chirped and cooed and rang temple bells with every flap of its wings. Besaid had been hard. Valefor had been easy. It came to her in love.

Four: Ifrit in Kilika, sweating until it stung her eyes. There was nothing easy about Ifrit. She lost track of time down in that steam vent of a chamber, praying until all the bones in her body hurt. The Fayth and Aeon both were lazy lava flows, packed red clay, patient in dormant volcano ways--but so was she. Long and painful, twelve hours, like labor, but she walked back into the temple hall in her sweat-soaked furisode with a fire-demon in her veins, triumphant.

Three: Ixion in Djose, lost in thought. For twenty years, she watched the other acolytes shuffle through their studies, thinking they could save the world with cure spells and timely sacrifice. They wouldn't make it, she thought, and she knew she had to be different.

She was no healer. Djose had made that obvious. When the sick and dying packed together outside the temple, she had nothing to offer them but the promise that she would give them a beautiful Sending. Ixion understood--her gorgeous lightning buck was still just a goat, still bred in rugged draft-like shapes just like they use for plowing in the hinterlands, an animal that had no choice but to press to the end of the row.

Priests flocked to tend the wounded after the battle took its share of blood, working for weeks and seeing no end over the piles of the dead. She only moved on, static-spined, hoofbeats in her heart.

Two: She is here in Macalania, a foggy, crystallized breath away from Bevelle. There are Aeons inside of her, messy and filling her head, and she still has to find how two more will fit. Grief coaxed Valefor, and dedication won Ifrit, and endurance called to Ixion, but she doesn't know where Shiva will go. She's running out of space.

They walk together into the grand antechamber, where chilly mountain wind gusts through vents and swirls snow up to the domed bronze ceiling. She's wet and shivering and starting to lose feeling in her fingers, even through the thick wool of her gloves; she's sure the way he crosses his arms is less out of annoyance and more an attempt to preserve body heat, so far out of his own elements of sand and baking sun.

He huffs a damp clump of hair out of his eyes. “So how long is this gonna take?”

“I don't know yet. Maybe five minutes, maybe five days. It's different for every summoner.”

“No offense, but if you're in there for five days, I'm out. Just gonna take my severance package and whatever limbs I haven't hacked off and head south until I get back feeling below the waist. Nothing personal.” He shoulders up next to her, back to the door, taking in the elaborate goldleaf tracery in the stone floors. It's supposed to be in jest, she thinks, but she can hear irritation bleed into his voice. “If it's all the same to you, I'm dragging me and my frostbite back upstairs. Where they have, you know. Heat.”

There's a quick shiver in her, different from the cold, that says she doesn't want him to go. There's a countdown in her head, two one zero, two one zero, and she doesn't want to be alone when the minutes tick down to her midnight; she doesn't want to be alone when she steps out of that chamber, lips blue and joints stiff and beaded with cold sweat with an ice goddess inside her. It's too late in the pilgrimage to be an island, now.

“You should come inside,” she says.

His eyebrows lift and he gives her an incredulous look, lips that can't decide whether they want to smirk or grimace. “You're drunk, right? I'm trying to figure out what would make you say something so blatantly batshit and that's all I got. Even I know the kind of bonfire they're gonna roast you over if they find out you took so much as a pet rock in there with you.”

( _She knows the fire too, if they were to be caught. Excommunication for her, execution for him, a short and starving stay in the Via Purifico. They might spin the story in her favor, the maesters of Yevon; summoners in the field means the world is hurting, but only one summoner in the field is a graveness beyond gravity, which makes her a light that cannot be snuffed. They'd cry heresy and brainwashing at her brave Al Bhed, absolve her of blame. They'd call a bloodhunt on his people._

 _She could be the end of him._

 _She will be, if he stays._ )

She presses her hands against the door, swinging the stone slabs aside on their hinges. A burst of cold, stale air rushes through the gap, bites into her sinuses and cheeks. “It's not like anybody's going to come down and check on us. Not even clergy is allowed down here. Who's going to know?” She wraps a hand around his forearm. “Come on! This is a once in a lifetime chance.”

“Twice in a lifetime. There's still Bevelle.”

“So you know that our time's running out.” She smiles smaller than she intends, with a voice to match, and clears her throat to loosen up the words. “Are you coming or not?”

His laugh is crystal in the way it echoes off all the stone and metal, and he murmurs ' _you're crazy'_ for maybe the tenth or twentieth time since they met, but he still takes her hand.

The chamber glitters in the half-light, curtains of diamonds strung together with platinum in spiderweb patterns, like impacts in glass. In the center, the statue of the Fayth lays embedded in the silver-scrolled stone floor, trillion-cut, soaking up all the light. It _gleams._

She walks to the edge, kneels down, sees the Fayth inside without all the reflective angles. Shiva exists in the world as a body on a backdrop of sapphire with her hair arranged, bound in leather and wrapped in spikes for war, counterpoint to every curve of her, and faceless. Like all Fayth, she is face-down, looking to the Farplane.

Shiva used to be a priestess, she knows, just like her--just like all the little girls in her temple wanted to be, whispering silliness under their blankets at night. I want to be like Shiva, because there are so few names in those books for small girls to dream into the shoes of, only martyrs; _I want to be beautiful and brave and loved_. She wonders if she should visit the temple orphanage when she returns to Bevelle and tell the next generation of summoners infantas that Shiva chose to die with her back to the world.

“Never really thought it was true.” His face has a tightness to it, deep-thinking brows and mouth in a line. “I mean, you hear the stories. Aeons are the souls of the faithful and whatever. Figured they were a trick of pyreflies, like reverse Fiends or some shit. Didn't actually think they were people.”

“Want to know a secret? I didn't either. Not really. But I saw my first Fayth in Besaid and just sort of...knew it had to be true.” She pulls her gloves off and brushes her fingers along the rock. It feels like ice, pinpricking at her skin. “Did you know Valefor used to be a little girl? I don't think she was any older than I was when I started my summoner training. Her Fayth was so small.”

He lets out a low whistle and shakes his head, kneeling beside her. His hand cups her shoulder, warms it, and she smiles just slightly. “Wonder what would make a kid decide she wants to die for Yevon.”

She swallows down the stab she feels somewhere near her gut and doesn't answer, just puts both hands palm-flat on the stone, soaks up the cold until they start tingling with numbness. Shiva was a mountain to her people, brave and stoic and fierce and beautiful; she'd wanted to be like that too, more than anything. She'd learned ice spells to familiarize herself with the cling of winter, in the hope that one day, she'd greet Shiva like a sister-in-arms. ( _She wishes she could dream like that again._ )

“You ever ask your padres about what happens in Zanarkand, then? I mean, if Aeons are people, then the Final Aeon--”

“Could you _shut up_ , please?” she snaps, hates the way her own voice sounds like rime. “I need to concentrate.”

He snaps his jaw shut with a click of teeth and steps back to lean against the wall, watching. And she lies down on the stone, closer than she's ever dared with any other Fayth, presses her hand where Shiva's is outstretched, like their palms could ever meet. She lies there, breath fogging the statue; she lies there with a prayer gurgling in her lungs. It's not the clumsy recitations she did for Valefor, or the stalwart faith she showed for Ifrit, or the revelations shared with Ixion. It's a child's prayer, panicked, repeated over and over and over and over, until her eyelashes are heavy with frost:

 _Help me find another way._

\---

Yunalesca welcomes her home.

There is a muteness to the temple, tight-lipped and caught between sound, and the first sight to greet her is Yunalesca in stone, worn to smoothness by the curious hands of children over the course of centuries, and clergy who may as well be the same. Her guardian meets no trouble. No one talks to them.

She rubs the statue at its base, thumb against the rise and fall of the first High Summoner's beaded ankle bracelet carved into her bare feet, the repetition of an action she's been making since she was a tiny girl with her eyes on future greatness. Yunalesca is her favorite High Summoner, her favorite statue, the story her favorite in the canon of Yevon. _The woman who ended the war._ Yunalesca brought the Song to the people when they were already on their knees.

After Yunalesca, they never stood up.

The girl who helps prepare their room shares the name--”Please, just Yuna,” she says, more politeness than a child should know what to do with, halfbreed eyes turned to the floor--and she is small and reverent and contained. The name is cut in half and it suits her, Yunalesca in pieces; Yuna with a pilgrim's stoop from the weight of a legacy, made meek in supplication.

( _She is the first to talk to her guardian, small hands wringing the hem of her robe, with her voice low and whispering like a secret. “My mother was Al Bhed.” He gives the girl the only smile Bevelle would see out of him._ )

She talks to Yuna in the privacy of the room, summoner and summoner-aspirant, priestess and acolyte; Yuna takes her elder's hair and weaves flowers into the black flow of it and asks questions for years, about the pilgrimage, about the Fayth, about what has happened is happening will happen in the steps to come.

“My father was going to be a summoner,” Yuna says as the cloister bell rings, gathering her things to leave. “But they made him stop because of my mother.”

She pauses in the doorway and takes a breath to try to suck in all the bad thoughts, but all that trained containment fails; her face is sour, lips pursed, eyebrows severe and she says it in that low and secret voice of hers, like Yevon might hear it if she didn't.

“It's not fair.”

She tugs Yuna into her arms then, holds her close and tight and protective.

“It never will be,” she says.

( _That night, she takes him down into the Bevelle Cloister, a place darker than she's ever known, suspended by lights and metal and machina over a pit she can't see to the bottom, and she feels poised to fall._

 _When she can no longer think of a good reason not to, she does._

 _She leads him into the Chamber, the holiest of all rooms for the holiest of all Fayth in the holiest of all cities, grabs him with fingers in his feathered hair and pulls him into a kiss that is teeth and heat and desperation and all the wrong kinds of grief. Everything is wrong, has always been wrong, wrong questions with wrong answers, and this is a wrong that she chooses for herself: his clever hands working at the edges of her obi, swordsman calluses on soft, temple-chaste skin._

 _It could have worked, she thinks, the boy who didn't know how to die and the girl who didn't know how to live, but they're teaching too much to each other and the only thing left to do is grieve. She murmurs apologies against the corner of his mouth and he chides her, swallows them up. “Nothing to be sorry for,” he whispers with that kind of confidence that makes her want to believe it too, and as he lies her down on the spread of her silk robes, she does, for a little while._

 _She sleeps in the Chamber and dreams of it working, dreams of being different people, dreams of a garden of white camellias and music that he plays for her; but she wakes and she is still a summoner and he is still Al Bhed and there is no place for them in a world that wants them both to die._

 _“It's not fair,” she cries to Bahamut, the slopes of her shoulders heaving. It's in the dark of Bevelle that she falls apart. She has always been a child here. “It's not fair at all.”_

 _But Bahamut is a child too, like Valefor, given to the stone too early, a choice made before he could fathom the consequences, and he understands._

“I know,” _he replies._ )

\---

Gagazet, that holy, brutal mountain that juts up in razor peaks between Zanarkand and the rest of the world, is built to break summoners. She only wraps herself in furs, sets her jaw, and marches into the bitter killing winds.

It had been the home of her spiritwalker guardian before he made his promise, and he spoke of it rarely and gravely. He had been a shaman, walking winding dead-roads from before Yevon, through cradles of gutted granite; before he guarded her, he guarded secrets, and before he wrote letters in human-tongue, he wrote the language of magic. He'd taught her Ronso ways as much as he could, to prepare her: to stand as the Ronso do, strong like the mountain they protect; to make her motions precise and deliberate, to hold her pen and her staff and her words like a lance. To become a cutting tool, slicing to the heart of the world.

She wonders if he would be proud of her.

When they reach the home of the Ronso, no words are exchanged. Her guardian had never liked to talk much--complained of human-words tasting sour in his mouth--and she knows that actions speak louder to people who are built to watch the rise and fall of centuries. She gently pulls bead-strings out of her hair, Besaid glass beads of shocking lagoon green on woven white fur, dangling chips of carved horn that clack together like marbles at the end, and places them in the Elder's palm, cupping his hand around them. He nods to her, and she nods at him, and she leaves the village with a vice grip on her Al Bhed's hand. There won't be any resting until the end, now, but they wouldn't have let her stay even had she wanted to. Gagazet is a test. An untried summoner is a tragedy. They must be cold and unyielding, pieces of the mountain in themselves.

The climb up is hard, but they'd never been under any illusions that it would be different. Gagazet murders. They pass the graves of fallen summoners and guardians and she stops long enough at each one to brush the snow from bits of piled rock and rusted weapons. He's complained much on their journey together over the weeks and months, of Moonflow muck in his boots and the diamond dust of Macalania that makes it hard to breathe. He complains all the way up the mountain just to hear his own voice drowning out the howl of the wind. When they reach these markers, he stops: because he is half a soldier, and he knows how to honor those who die in the field.

He takes poorly to the cold. They stop frequently and she warms him with fire spells and hot meals until his teeth stop cracking together, until he can curse without biting a clumsy tongue. This is not his test--he was not built for it, the desert-child that he is--but he follows in her footsteps with a will folded in on itself for strength. In the end, he finds his footing, stubborn as a mountain goat, and not even fiends can move him. He stares into the echos of failed pilgrimages and cuts them down, makes a path for her with blood freezing to his sword.

This is her test, though, and she thrives. The snow is cleansing. She pushes bare hands into it, burning with cold fire; she sucks down clotted oxygen, hurting her lungs. There are images that sear into the backs of her eyes--temple ruins sagging down the side of the mountain like nests abandoned by the autumn; a path carved by hot springs and waterfalls, where the entire rock face is a jigsaw of limbs and bodies, unworshipped Fayth packed together until the wall is more flesh than stone.

They are images meant to shock, and they do. Gagazet is the revealer of hard truths. It takes the perfumed shroud of Yevon and shreds it between great rocky fingers. He pulls a recording sphere from his bag with the intent of capturing the Fayth, for her to take back with her, for the world to watch when people find her body and sort through her belongings--spitting things like _un-fucking-believable_ , and _everyone should see this_ \--but she puts a hand on his wrist and shakes her head.

“They're not like you.” It's later that night, and she's addressing the curve of his neck, cold lips to warm skin. A storm rages outside their cave and they're tangled under furs, and she's not sure if it's for warmth or comfort or if the distinction even matters at this altitude. “They don't think any of this is wrong.”

Gagazet sorts her. She was messy with her Aeons inside of her, before: Ixion, Shiva, Bahamut, Ifrit, Valefor, all at odds with each other and her, the complaints and the pain at being crammed together. Gagazet organizes them, makes her put them all in their proper places. The noise inside of her quiets. Bahamut's booming voice vibrates down her spine as he says injustice is immovable but surmountable; Ixion tells her that earth does not want to be plowed, that it's difficult work to make a furrow, but others will walk behind her to plant seeds where she has been. Ifrit lectures on patience: that nothing is changed overnight. Shiva breathes chilly words into her ear about choice, that she can make decisions both selfish and selfless, her back to the world that adores her.

Valefor is fierce and reminds her to love fiercely. She thinks of all the people in Spira who could be like her Ronso or her Al Bhed, the ones she loves 'til her heart could burst with it, and she loves them, too. She loves the lives that will take to growth like kudzu in the sun of a ten year Calm; she loves the people who will forget their practiced hate and dance in the streets, singing praises for the Al Bhed man who helped deliver them all.

She loves the lives that will come after her. The line is finite--a door will move if pushed hard enough, long enough--and she loves that, too.

Their last night on Gagazet, they tell each other stories.

She tells him about Bevelle and its harsh winters, about learning how to dance in the courtyard, about her Ronso keeper. She can feel his laugh resonate in his chest as she rests her head against it and tells him about the time she ran away for three days, hiding in the woods outside the city, because they would not let her practice outside at night. She talks about trying not to feel too happy when they gifted her final staff, with its silver head like a pinwheel and dripping diamonds like stars.

He tells her about Home, about learning the sway of the land with its changing geography, about hot days and sunburn and pushing his brother into oases and getting dragged down with. He tells her about life in a world without summoners to send the dead; about his time out in the desert with brothers-in-arms, hunting the monster-form of the girl who gave him his first kiss, baiting the storm-fiend with apples and cactus flowers. _Easier when they don't look like people you know._ He tells her about Djose, about watching her dance for his brother and not knowing how to feel about it.

They talk about futures that won't ever be.

“Could still go back.” He runs fingers along her scalp, brushing hair out of her face absently, her head on his stomach. “I'd land a salvage gig, you'd do all the Sendings, we'd get a crap apartment above a bunch of punk-ass kids who keep stealing our mail. You can't tell me it wouldn't be great.”

She makes a long, thoughtful noise in her throat, thinks about little Yuna and her mother and father, the priest and the Al Bhed, and knows that they wouldn't fare any better. “Only if I get to have a garden.”

“You could have a goddamn jungle. Anything you wanted.” And she knows he's thinking about Yuna, too.

When morning breaks, they stand together and watch the sun rise behind Zanarkand until the silhouette burns into them, and continue on their way.

\---

Zanarkand boils with the millennium-dead, not knowing that the war is over--some still half-human, pyrefly recreations of the weapons they'd been issued, lumbering in strange clothes and crazed with hunger. The air vibrates with the residue of ringing steel and magic. Gagazet had left them flagging. Now, they're exhausted.

There are too many pyreflies to dance for. Too many fiends. No memories are forgotten, here; they walk on broken pathways and shimmy over rusting girders and watch the movements of summoners long before her played back like recordings, Yocun and Ohalland and Gandof, statues she recognizes. There are others, too, ones who never made it into the temple records. Zanarkand is the only place that remembers them.

She watches guardians speak of offering themselves to the stone. She listens to summoners speak of making choices, to pick who means the most to them.

Her Al Bhed says it with wryness in his voice, a thing she knows will be seen and heard by the next, and the next, and the next, because strong feelings always leave their imprints: “Guess that solves the mystery.”

She is not surprised when they reach the Chamber of the dead Fayth, looking down at the first Final Aeon--he had laughed at that, all black humor even now--and seeing the statue broken, the soul of it gone. She is not surprised, but she is disappointed. There is still something of a child in her, wishing for an easy way out. She casts a sidelong glance to him, remembers him as they met--angry and raw, a spitfire, sucking blood off his knuckles, finding somewhere else to be; the fighter who threw himself against the teeth of dragon-fiends just to stab them in the tongue.

She supposes it's the same thing. He cuts to maim, to wound, to kill. He wars. That will be all he'll do, soon.

( _She despairs to see him trapped in stone._ )

Yunalesca greets them as they stand atop the cracked statue of her dead husband, an undead goddess with whipping snake-hair and a face that never shifts into anything beyond a glaze of kindness and watery detachment. She fights bile down her throat when she sees the first High Summoner, a vile, visceral, natural reaction in the presence of an Unsent. The woman she had only ever known as a marble sculpture walks as though she still belongs on this earth, the gold of her ankle bangles jingling like bells.

( _She'd been tracing those bangles in stone since she was a child and there is a part of her that hates this woman now for more than just the words that come out of a false mouth._ )

“The Final Aeons are our friends,” Yunalesca says, a speech-like recitation. “They are wives and husbands, betrothed, children, family. They are people we love and trust. That bond is the only thing that will kill Sin, even as it kills the summoner. I chose my husband, Zaon, as mine. You should have seen him.”

“So what happens after?”

Yunalesca looks at her Al Bhed as though he's attacked her, neck moving like a bullwhip. “The Aeon becomes Sin. The world has its Calm. Does anything more need to happen?”

“Wait.” He runs his fingers through his hair like he does when he's in disbelief, an action she's seen more and more as the pilgrimage went on. “That's why this shit keeps happening? Summoner dies for nothing, Sin comes back, everyone loses? That's the foundation for this whole bullshit religion?”

Yunalesca quirks a slithering brow, indifferent to his fire. “Do you falter, then?”

He presses his lips into a line and turns his back on the woman, moves to where his own summoner is standing and takes her hands in his. “You shouldn't do this,” she says, small-voiced. “You don't have to. We could leave.”

“And do what?” He pulls her in, dips down for a last kiss that lingers where she can feel the hesitation. He cups her cheek, presses chapped lips against her forehead, says words she doesn't understand in his desert-tongue. Everything about him is so strangely gentle that it unnerves her more than anything. “I think I have a plan.”

“You aren't sure?”

“Nope.” And he gives her that grin of his, teeth and triumph and confidence that makes her swell with it secondhand. “Time to say something stupid like 'see you on the other side'. Maybe we'll have better luck next time.”

“Maybe,” she whispers.

She takes the time to remember the friction of skin as their hands slip apart and he walks to Yunalesca in wait, Yunalesca in pieces, who takes his arm with a large, river-like smile, serpentine and flowing, and she hates that woman more than she has ever hated anyone. He will be her Fayth, her Aeon, and she wonders how he will fit inbetween all that hate.

“I've never had an Al Bhed before. What strange eyes.”

She watches them retreat through the chamber door, the door she could never follow through, sinking to the floor as she waits, scrubbing at her eyes with dirty furisode sleeves, planning each step for the beautiful dance she will give him.

\---

  


  
_“I think I know exactly what you'll be.”_   


  


\---

She meets him for the last time in the Calm Lands.

She wants to dance in the gloaming again, watch the sea fill her vision like a spilled reservoir of india ink, so she waits for the sky to bleed red and orange out of indigo and takes her place by the shore. The grey, gravelly sand cuts like coral at her bare feet. There are dark clouds bubbling above her, spotting out the stars; cumulonimbus sponges soaking up all the color. She counts the minutes to her own midnight.

Sin churns closer at the horizon, like it was always meant to. This is their first and last meeting.

When it's time, she begins to dance.

The other Aeons have stepped back, pushing against the sides of her mind to clear space, to let him through, to let him blaze in with heat and light and fury, fearful-reverent-respectful. He's in her nerves and she can feel their heartbeats, hers thundering and his in flutters down her spine, through her toes, to the tips of her fingers, the hair on her nape standing at attention. There's only the slightest pause as she thinks of how to call him--how best to reach him, when she could shout his name until her throat bleeds and he wouldn't ever hear it--and decides that he'll come running if she shows him what needs to be killed. He was a fighter--a warrior--a soldier--and it's in his nature to protect, attack, defend.

So she shows him. She draws out the thread of fear curled in her gut, the one that she could swallow but never excise, lets it flood her for just this moment because sometimes it's alright to be scared and he could never stand to see her so. And _oh_ , he responds. He sweeps through her like sparks igniting a bushfire, drowns her in a power that sears all the oxygen out of her lungs, that hurts her, that _burns her_. Her body is on fire and she is made of electric lights pulsing coronas and there is too much to contain because she was not built to contain him, not for long. He's a backdraft held by an ice shell and he is melting her from the inside; where the others were difficult, leaving her weak and strained and stretched to breaking, he's _impossible._

Together, they are temporary. He's killing her. She looks up at the clouds gathering, the ones that devour the stars and the colors and the sunset until there's no light to see by except the white dance of heat lightning. Her entire body hurts and her eyes ache to watch, but the clouds part _violently_ , rend apart as though he's fighting fiends, and he's _there_. He looses an avian shriek that shockwaves through the whole of her and echoes off the mountain crests, loud enough for Bevelle to hear.

( _She laughs because that is his point, his plan, to grow so large and loud the whole world should hear him, and he is killing her but he is killing her fear and she feels nothing but fierce love fighting at his side._ )

He is a thunderbird, beautiful and brilliant and frightening and perfect, all plumage made of chrome that flashes like mercury in the lightning, sword-tipped flight feathers and talons like hooked ritual knives and a beak made to cut through plating and armor. Every part of him is a weapon; every part of him is _him_ , red and black and silver machina-colors, eyes that glow white like the hottest part of fire. He beats his wings and the earth shakes with the strength of the thunder. Lightning sets the world ablaze.

( _She fears for him when he becomes Sin, when he rises again to terrorize and destroy and consume, pleads with him through the bond--please stay you, please stay you, please stay you--because she has just let loose the most terrifying creature she has ever seen and she will not be around to help him stay those killing talons, to tell him when enough is enough._ )

And she dances her last dance, the dance she made for him--oh, how her teachers would be proud to see her like this, a summoning and a sending at once, all her fluid graceful stunning motions. She dances for the joy of it, for this final act of breathing and feeling, coral-sand that hurts her feet, stitches in her sides; she dances for him, and for her, and her Ronso. Her chest heaves and sweat pricks at her back, makes her furisode itch, dries her lips and her throat and her head is pounding, and she is burning, and she is ecstatic as she feels what he feels, the air and the altitude and the sheer thrill of freedom as he tucks in wings and lances through a dive, a weapon made to cut to Sin's heart--

and the air fills with the wailing of pyreflies, bioluminescent in the cover of darkness that he has made for this world--

and she sees him tearing Sin apart, slicing through viscera, claws and beak cracking greasy vertebrae--

and she is burning through herself and her time is running out and he seconds are ticking down and--

they've won--

and he stands over her, dwarfs her, watches her with eyes made of heat and electrical discharge--

and he is gorgeous--

and he keens, a sound in a pitch that pierces, that carries through the Calm Lands, over the mountains, loud enough for the world to hear--

and she loses her footing, she falls--

 _and she burns, because she was never meant to keep him._

\---

  


  
_“Maybe we'll have better luck next time.”_   



End file.
